On Leadership At Large Companies

The solution is not to quit, it is not to accept the atmosphere you do not approve of, the solution is to take the initiative to be the change you want to see in the world!

I have recently read a popular post about an employee’s experience working at Microsoft for eight months. The post, written by Ahmet Alp Balkan, hit the front page of Reddit and Hacker News generating a lot of discussion around the validity of the points mentioned but not enough discussion about what to do in that situation when valid.

Ahmet, like many others would do, is starting to accept this subculture within Microsoft (or maybe the culture of Microsoft) and is trying to get comfortable within his team. I do not work in Microsoft nor do I know Ahmet, I can understand, however, what he is going through.

Here is what I learned working at a large corporation (VMware which is a direct competitor to Microsoft):

• Leadership Is Important
  Teams are structured in a way where every person on the team has her/his own tasks and/or features. The more features that need to be baked into the product, the more tasks each person gets, the less time they have to focus on building the team itself or fix the technical debt.
  That has been said, finding the time and taking the initiative to not only fix the issues and build a solid culture within the team, but to also rally the team around you is substantially important.
• If You Do Not Like What You See, Change It!
  If you do not like the atmosphere around you, the way people do their work, or the way the team understands their part building the product, change it! The chances are, you are not alone (if you are, that’s a completely different issue).
  Change is not easy, it takes time, and a lot of effort but you are in an engineering organization working with the smartest people in the industry, you should be able to communicate with them and start changing the culture within your team (and maybe even within the company).
• Make Fixing Technical Debt Important
  It might be hard for you to get recognized for fixing an issue with the code or contributing to open source. It is your responsibility to make sure an important achievement gets recognized.
  Involve others in it, make sure you get your team members to give you feedback, and work with others in the team to fix the issues.
  We’ve started working every Friday for couple of hours on our technical debt as a team, and believe me, things change quickly. Fixing issues becomes part of the work and management follows on the footsteps of the engineers. It becomes in the team’s best interest to document, comment, and submit good code because at the end it is the team’s responsibility to go through this together every week.
• Be Passionate
  This is very important. People do recognize passion and they look at what you are saying differently when you have it. I am not saying it will solve your issues but it will make it easier for you to push those issues further within your peers.
• Educate Others
  One of the points mentioned in the original post referenced here is the idea that engineers did not know the competition. That is not okay even if they are not the ones taking decisions. Take it upon yourself to educate them. Give a tech talk, send an email with a news article or two, get everyone to discuss it during lunch.
• Accept That You Are Wrong (Sometimes)
  It is really hard to know the difference between “you are wrong” and this is “just a push back” and the answers to each of them is very different. You need to have the ability to recognize when you are just wrong and be able to simply move on with what’s right. What’s more important is the ability to recognize when you are not wrong and push forward.

I understand where the frustration comes from. It is hard to work in a team you do not fully feel like you belong to. The solution, however, is not to accept it, the solution is to change it.